Learn about the benefits provided by Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition

Reasons why I think you need Toad for Oracle Xpert Edition. Now, you may well have a Base Edition or a Professional Edition right now which is serving your basic needs as a developer or DBA. But what we're seeing from a lot of the customers that we go out to see is that there are challenges that are requiring them to make changes to the way that they operate.
So number one is, we're seeing that there's a great need for the generation of high-quality data for effective debugging and for unit testing. Number two is, we're seeing that a lot of development shops are changing the way they work. They're moving to more agile methodologies, continuous integration, et cetera, which is being driven by their business to help lower costs and improve operation efficiency. And therefore, there's an even greater need to address code quality, reliability to help minimize the number of unplanned development cycles as they move toward Agile.
We're also seeing that the challenges of managing multiple development teams across different geographies and different departments is becoming more of a problem, and particularly around the enforcement of code quality related policies. We're also seeing that developers and DBAs are under greater pressure to address application performance. And you can see in this pyramid here that when you consider that most of the application performance issues come from SQL statements and indexes, this is a big problems for developers in particular to address these types of SQL-related performance problems.
And finally, because of the need to get applications into production quicker, there's a greater need for deployment scripts to be accurate and based on a particular build process. So as customers, moving eventually towards continuous deployment requires the deployment scripts to be really accurate.
OK. So let's now look at what the Toad solutions offer in total. And we have solutions that support both the development process as well as functions that database administrators have to deal with. And it's kind of an infinite loop. So we have solutions that support the development life cycle-- so moving from requirements definition through to designing the schema, building the objects, maintaining the objects, testing, debugging, right through to functional testing, scalability testing, QA, making sure that code and the SQL assignments are running efficiently, and then finally, building the deployment script, which the DBA will pick up and apply into the production database.
And then from a DBA's perspective, helping them to simplify and automate their administration of the databases, helping them to diagnose the root cause of performance slowdowns and resolving those problems, and minimizing the risks associated with planned changes in their databases to minimize outages and downtime, and then building reports and automation, and informing development when there needs to be changes, which then lead back into requirements definition. And so the process continues. And so we provide solutions in both of these key areas.
Let's look at the specific editions that are available, starting with developers. And at the top, you see the Base Edition, which is quite popular with many users. It's the entry level edition of Toad. It has a lot of the basic functions, like debugging and refactoring code. And as we move into Professional Edition, we start seeing the ability to generate data and do code reviews. But the Xpert Edition combines all of those things, also with capability of optimizing SQL to make sure that applications will run well when they're deployed into production environment. And for me, this is the minimum edition if you're really serious about building quality, high-performance applications for production.
And then we have Development Suite, which adds in other capabilities as well, such as unit testing and scalability testing. If we move forward to the editions for DBAs, it's a similar thing. You can have a base, professional, and expert edition, to which you can add some database administration capabilities, which is the Database Admin Module. And then there are three database suites-- DBA Suites for Oracle at the instance level, RAC clusters, and exadata appliances.
So now I want to talk about the web-based training, which is brand new from version 12.5. This is free training. It's self-paced, so you can work at your own speed.
It's hands-on. It has simulations built in, so you feel like you're using Toad. And these courses are important, because they make sure that, as you move up to the Xpert Edition, that you understand how all these different features work.
So you're guided through by a professional instructor to make sure that you understand how these different features work. So there are some advanced development courses coming soon. But right now, we have a basics course, and then we have three database administration courses. You register for these courses during installation of Toad or simply on Toad World.
Toad World is our user community. It's used by around three million users per year. And it enables people to connect with experts and peers, share knowledge, and get help and access lots and lots of resources about Toad for Oracle and many other products-- so any of the Toad products and all the different platforms that we support, or we can focus on a platform. You can learn from our experts and become an expert yourself.